


The Experience of

by rainstormcolors



Category: Yu-Gi-Oh!
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-30
Updated: 2017-03-30
Packaged: 2018-10-12 21:48:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,212
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10500108
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rainstormcolors/pseuds/rainstormcolors
Summary: Seto Kaiba's life. Post The Darkside of Dimensions.





	

**Author's Note:**

> In a way, this could be a blue print to a much longer work.

All Seto had left of his mother were memories of memories, scattered like a handful of fading grey stars. Once or twice, Mokuba had asked about her but Seto had nothing to give him. Seto remembered their father a little better, but it was as if those memories had the substance of a fairytale. Neither of his parents would ever know him. What he was. What he would become. That thought had crossed his mind a couple times, but he didn’t really care.  
What Seto did remember was loneliness, and wondering why his mother and father had left him.  
He remembered his uncle and grandmother telling him this was for his and Mokuba’s own good, and knowing even then they were lying to his face.

There was nothing left inside him to feel as he watched Gozaburo leap from the window to his death.

When did he start to feel things again?

.

His rival, his friend, the Other Yugi. Suddenly all the passion Seto felt had no place to go, and his head and his heart felt gelatinous.  
He’d followed that man across three-thousand years and he’d followed that man to the desert.  
The world was split between sand and sky and somehow it felt like another world as Yugi appeared from the temple without the Millennium Puzzle hung from his neck. The truth was Seto had arrived at the temple in time, but he didn’t enter. At that time, he couldn’t have answered why.  
It was all a book with no ending, cut abruptly mid-paragraph, mid-sentence.  
He told himself he didn’t care, but then in the night for no reason and at nothing he screamed, “Goddamn coward!”

_Why did_

_Why am_

It was an obsession. It wasn’t a dark hole but a red hemorrhage. The memory of that man’s face, his voice, the burning colors of his eyes. Like a phantom image every time Seto blinked.  
The pod would split his consciousness from his body.  
He didn’t care about the risks anymore. The neural signals were balanced and he couldn’t wait any longer. Through the monitor, Mokuba, his young brother, stared at him with concerned eyes.  
Seto’s voice bellowed, “Duel dimension system activate!”

_What even are you to me?_  
_Atem._

.

The visits became a weekly ritual. It made it easier for Seto to control his emotions when he was there.  
They stood together on the balcony---Seto and the Pharaoh---cupped by the palms of night, gazing across the ancient and candlelit city, the sky like a black ocean.  
“Would you say you had a happy life or a sad one up until that point?” Seto asked him.  
Atem thought for a moment and then said, “It was mostly happy, with bits of sadness here and there. When I try to remember it's like looking through a fogged window. But it gets clearer the longer I stay here.”  
Atem went to sit on the ledge then, facing now towards the dark river. But his eyes remained focused on the man standing beside to him. “My father loved me. I know that very well. He fell ill when he discovered it took a genocide to create the seven Millennium Items, but I can't really remember it myself.” He shut his eyes, and his words were full of warmth. “I’m glad to know him again.”  
“... Do they feel like your memories or someone else's?”  
“There's no doubt they're mine. But those memories are thousands of years old and for a long time I had forgotten them. But… I feel like I’m home here. I do miss that world and Yugi and my friends, but I feel whole.”  
Atem patted next to himself on the ledge, an invitation, and with clumsiness Seto sat. Together, they were quiet.  
“Do you mind if I ask you something personal myself?” Atem said.  
“Depends.”  
“Can I ask you... what your original family name was?”  
Seto didn't answer immediately, his face without emotion.  
“You don't have to tell me if you don't want to.”  
“It doesn't matter. That chapter of my life ended years ago. Those people abandoned Mokuba and me. I have nothing but contempt for that name now.”  
“I understand.”  
Seto held it for a moment, and then let it go. “... It was .”  
Seto understood Atem could’ve found out the answer to this question by himself. Likewise, Seto hadn’t spoken the name in years. _Abandoned Mokuba._ There was a soft pinprick of pain inside those words.  
“Thank you for telling me," Atem said gently.  
Speck by speck, Seto felt his mind slowly returning to his flesh from that paradise.

.

The way life would unspool like strange music from there, the way time ticked on with such methodic indifference. How every birthday and Christmas he’d be sent avalanches of cards and small gifts from children and fans, and it was a slow and heady realization: he was beloved. It was because he was the best, wasn’t it? No, there was something more innocent going on here.  
Mokuba grew taller and took to drinking espresso.  
And it was difficult to admit in a way, but Seto enjoyed his partnership with Yugi. Sometimes after working on a rare project together, they’d go and have a coffee. Yugi did most of the chatting, but Seto found it all oddly tolerable. And at some point they began to schedule the occasional coffee meeting without the precedent of work, and sometimes Seto would discover Jonouchi or Anzu had tagged along uninvited.  
“So how’s Atem doing?”  
Really what Yugi was asking was, “How are you both doing?”  
He wasn’t surprised when he was invited to Yugi and Anzu’s wedding, but he was surprised when he was invited to Jonouchi’s and then later to Honda’s. For the latter two, he felt sending a card with a check inside was good enough.  
Mokuba fell in love with a waitress at a restaurant he frequented. She was kind, loved books and the rain and she played a violin. They’d been dating for nearly two years when she broke it to him that she was pregnant and without hesitation, the next day Mokuba proposed to her. And it was this gesture that had Seto wondering if maybe he should propose to Atem.  
And there was a time, before Mokuba had his son, when Seto met Yugi for coffee and Yugi was somber. There was no light or air in his voice. He stared into his cup as he said the words.  
“Anzu had a miscarriage…”  
Seto had no idea what to say, no idea what to do. And it baffled him beyond words when, as the two parted ways, Yugi told him softly with complete sincerity, “Thank you.”  
Three years later Yugi and Anzu would have a healthy daughter, and as Anzu held her for the first time, for as exhausted and drugged as she was, she felt she never wanted that moment to end.

When Sugoroku Mutou died, the fractured pieces of his soul didn’t reunite. Instead Sugoroku went to be with his wife and family. That’s what Atem said, because somehow he knew. At the time, Seto was glad to know his identity wouldn’t be erased by fusing with _that other guy_. He didn’t think much else of it.

The moon was out in daytime, a lilac-silver hue. Sitting on a park bench, watching Yugi’s daughter try to push Mokuba’s son on the swing set. It was perhaps the most perfect scene Seto’d ever witnessed. It was the light of life.

.

Seto was fifty-six now. His trips to Atem’s afterlife were becoming harder on his body. How was it that Atem could look at him the same way now as when they were young? Atem was still so beautiful, all lovely skin, his eyes so alive and violet. It was when Seto hit his late twenties that a small piece of him felt filthy touching Atem’s still-young body.  
Seto’d been having flu-like symptoms for a long while then. He had hid them as best he could, from others and from himself. When the truth came it punctured his lungs like a knife.  
He sat with Atem on the bank of the river as the world turned indigo. The clouds were spectral, blue, and glassy. A sea bird skimmed the air.  
“I have cancer.”  
Atem stared at him silently, but Seto looked only to the water.  
“The survival rate for the variety I have isn’t favorable. I waited too long.”  
“Seto…”  
Seto said what came next with a detached sharpness. “Do you know what chemotherapy actually is? They poison you, hoping it will kill the tumor before it kills you.”  
Atem’s lips tightened. As he took Seto’s hand, Seto had to fight himself to not rip it away.

.

Children from across the world sent him get-well cards in rainbow-colored envelopes, but he was too numb to open a single one.  
He was spilling: a shattered vase, shattered window, firing employees over nothing, deleting entire projects from his computer when one thing went wrong.  
His body had betrayed him. He hated being this way, so weak and helpless. New symptoms arrived each time they switched out his chemotherapy. Mottled heat of nausea, a deep ache in every muscle. He felt his body falling apart, and it chilled him to his barest ether to realize he was absolutely terrified. He was terrified as it became more and more difficult to do the small everyday tasks. He was terrified as he knew Mokuba and Yugi were watching him fall apart. He was terrified he’d never see his husband again. To just pull himself out of bed left him wheezing for minutes, hacking up blots of blood-tinted phlegm.  
Atem. Was this feeling anything like what he’d felt, that first time he died? There was no nobility in this.  
Seto hadn’t been afraid of death before. He could have killed himself right then and have escaped such humiliating misery. But Mokuba’s family. And then Atem’s afterlife… was it also his afterlife? Both of them had noticed how closed off Atem’s world seemed from other spirits. Seto never did meet his parents there. They would never be anything more than ghosts spinning in his memories. But then he never really wanted to find his parents and he never tried. The person he did want to find was the person he’d been chasing from the start: his husband.  
The doctors began feeding Seto a regiment of morphine and would pump the fluids from his lungs with a tube, which was always a piercingly painful process. He had to stop working for Kaiba Corporation. He wouldn’t take Yugi’s calls. He was so tired. It was at that point Seto made his decision.

.

Mokuba had brought Seto home from the hospital. Seto laid propped up in his bed, his lungs cleaned out and raw, and Mokuba sat in a chair beside him. The shadows of the room were blue.  
“I don’t want to do this anymore,” Seto said in a fragile voice.  
Mokuba, blank-faced, said nothing to this, an opalescent blade poured across his body from the slit in the window’s curtains.  
“I need you to help me with something,” Seto continued.  
Mokuba spoke gently. “What is it?”  
“Bring me to the space station. If I can’t do it myself, help secure me in the pod.” He breathed in. “Please.”  
There was a pause.  
“Alright,” Mokuba said.  
Seto realized if this worked, he might not see Mokuba or Yugi again. It felt familiar.  
“I’m sorry.”  
“It’s alright.”  
Seto almost added, “You deserved better,” but he held those words inside. Instead he said something else. It was something he’d realized a long time ago. “You were always the stronger one between us.”  
There was the faintest flicker of a sad smile on Mokuba’s face.

.

The trip to the station’s base had been quiet. Seto watched the person Mokuba had grown into, memorized every detail he could. A memory floated to the surface, of the day Mokuba announced he was getting married and was going to be a father. And then another one, forty-seven years old. It was a memory of a sandbox.  
They had to take the elevator up in shifts. Around them, everything was steel and cold, a grey luster. Mokuba helped to secure his brother inside the pod, a numbness in his fingertips. Seto heaved and hacked into his palm, leaving smears of dark slime.  
“Thank you.”  
Mokuba gave him a soft, “hmn.”  
They stared at each other for a moment. Both sets of eyes were tired.  
“Goodbye, Mokuba.”  
Something painful stirred in Mokuba’s face, and then he said, “Good luck. Goodbye, Nii-sama.”

He thought of Atem. Atem’s beautiful spirit blazing like a flame inside the glow of his heart. Seto hadn’t been inside the pod since he began chemo, and he didn’t know if he would survive the journey this time. But he had to try. If he was going to spend eternity inside an afterlife, it had to be that afterlife. It had to be with him. This time, if he made it to that clear sparkling otherworld, he wouldn’t be coming back. His heart thumped like a drum the size of a mountain.  
He launched the pod, and it was a pure crystalline light which took his hands and lead him somewhere.


End file.
